All about Internet Relay Chat

Category Archives: mIRC

“mIRC celebrates its tenth year of development today, of having played a small though curious, and unexpected, part in the life of the Internet over the last ten years”, the mIRC website announced.

“In the early years of IRC, IRC was mostly limited to technical users, people who used non-graphical, command-line IRC clients such as ircii, and who had a fairly intricate knowledge of how IRC and the Internet worked. mIRC was designed with one purpose in mind: to make the basics of IRC accessible to as many people as possible, while at the same time retaining the technical aspects which so many others enjoyed”. mIRC remains one of the most popular clients in use on IRC today.

“If some of you thought mIRC Resources had a somewhat peculiar decoration earlier today, you were right” the webmaster of mIRC-Egg.net reports on his site.

The website was defaced and showed a nazi symbol. We asked webmaster Bop how the defacement took place. “The actual defacement utilized a lacking input checking in the backend application for the site, PostNuke. This weakness has been exploited in the popular forum application phpBB previously (as a side note, we do not use for any part of the site).”

“A more thorough scan of the access log file shows a large number of similarly formatted GET strings during the days leading up to the defacement, and there have been attempts since as well, suggesting that any affected site should take steps to close down some of the holes.”

Bop also hinted to close the site, too “not waste time on this kinda nonsense.” We asked Bop if he would seriously consider doing so. “As far as shutting down the site, that’s something that inevitably becomes an issue from time to time if you spend enough effort on it without achieving whatever you’re trying to achieve at the moment. [...] Certainly I have no intent of doing so due to mere defacements, as these are nuisances more than actual problems.”

“And of course, on the flipside, I really should have updated the backend code long since, but there it is. It is all too easy to forget that IRC at the end of the day, for most of us still is a hobby, and lest we make it more, it should not have more impact on us than that, either.”

“Thanks to all of the mIRC users who registered their copies of mIRC between November 6th and December 6th to support our appeal, 100% of your registration has been donated to Medecins Sans Frontieres for use in their HIV/AIDS prevention and ARV treatment programmes around the world”, the mIRC website says.

This time a total of 2301 users registered their mIRC client, which raised a total of $46,020.00.

Time for a new charity appeal. “Nearly forty million people worldwide are infected with HIV/AIDS, 95% of whom live in the developing world”, the mIRC website states.

All money coming in from registrations now or the coming month will go to Medecins Sans Frontieres, an organization known for their work in developing nations where they received a nobel prize for. The money will be used for ARV’s (Antiretroviral Therapies) which will enable infected people to still have normal lives.